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In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar's cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar's code, or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet .
ROT13 is a special case of the Caesar cipher which was developed in ancient Rome, used by Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC. [1] An early entry on the Timeline of cryptography . ROT13 can be referred by "Rotate13", "rotate by 13 places", hyphenated "ROT-13" or sometimes by its autonym "EBG13".
All polyalphabetic ciphers based on the Caesar cipher can be described in terms of the tabula recta. The tabula recta uses a letter square with the 26 letters of the alphabet followed by 26 rows of additional letters, each shifted once to the left from the one above it. This, in essence, creates 26 different Caesar ciphers. [1]
An early substitution cipher was the Caesar cipher, in which each letter in the plaintext was replaced by a letter three positions further down the alphabet. [23] Suetonius reports that Julius Caesar used it with a shift of three to communicate with his generals. Atbash is an example of an early Hebrew cipher.
A message encoded with this type of encryption could be decoded with a fixed number on the Caesar cipher. [4] Around 800 AD, Arab mathematician Al-Kindi developed the technique of frequency analysis – which was an attempt to crack ciphers systematically, including the Caesar cipher. [3]
The Caesar cipher is an Affine cipher with a = 1 since the encrypting function simply reduces to a linear shift. The Atbash cipher uses a = −1 . Considering the specific case of encrypting messages in English (i.e. m = 26 ), there are a total of 286 non-trivial affine ciphers, not counting the 26 trivial Caesar ciphers.
For example, "UQJHSE" could be the code for "Proceed to the following coordinates." When using a cipher the original information is known as plaintext , and the encrypted form as ciphertext . The ciphertext message contains all the information of the plaintext message, but is not in a format readable by a human or computer without the proper ...
The book cipher is a type of homophonic cipher, one example being the Beale ciphers. This is a story of buried treasure that was described in 1819–21 by use of a ciphered text that was keyed to the Declaration of Independence. Here each ciphertext character was represented by a number.